


I was an eagle, and you were a dove.

by thecarlysutra



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, OMG wtf is this a history lesson?, Post-Civil War (Marvel), Road Trips, sexual healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 11:16:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6801505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecarlysutra/pseuds/thecarlysutra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the Iron Harvest.  Title from Laura Marling's "I Was an Eagle".  </p>
<p>Spoilers for <i>Civil War</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I was an eagle, and you were a dove.

  
Natasha has lost her covers. She has no skin to slip into; she must wear her own face. She has lost the organization that enables her to be a spy. She has no purpose; the needle on her compass just spins. She has lost this silly dream of being an Avenger. She has no team; she must exist on her own.

She started out that way, alone. Walking the hoarfrost clinging to the sidewalks, shivering in no coat. Madame B took her in. Then the KGB, then SHIELD. After SHIELD fell, the Avengers. She is 34 years old, and completely alone for a first time in her adult life.

It doesn't last long enough for her to grow comfortable. Someone has come for her.

***

Natasha has money, a lot of it, stored away in secret bank accounts in too many countries to count on one hand. She has skills; she can become anyone. She can become invisible.

Natasha isn't sure if she's a fugitive. What she does know is she has no interest in prison. She has no interest in the war. She is not a soldier, never wanted to be.

What she does want to be is a shadow. Faceless, fleeting. A presence real as you are that can never be pinned down or touched.

We don't every time get what we want.

She is in France when he finds her, living in a hotel where Toulouse Lautrec painted courtesans. She doesn't know much about art, but there's something romantic about the thought. Beautiful women stripping off their lipstick and tulle to be immortalized on canvas. Natasha likes the idea of immortality.

She has been using false papers. She has been keeping to herself. She has cut her hair.

Natasha is walking home from her morning breakfast at a café down the street from the hotel, sweet coffee and croissants so buttery and light that they melt on your tongue. She feels the familiar weight of someone's eyes on her, and walks on as if unaffected. There is a razor in her coat. She doesn't want a fight, but that doesn't mean she isn't ready for one.

She watches the man following her in the reflections of windows on the other side of the street. It rained last night, and the images are distorted. She can see the hotel ahead of her, and it is in the brass shine of the bell above the door that she finally glimpses his face.

Natasha stops, turns.

“Bruce,” she says.

***

She takes him up to her room before he can say anything. She shuts the door behind them, for a moment her back turned to him, her hand resting on the dark wood of the door. She turns to him, finally, and doesn't smile.

Bruce can't stop looking at her. All of his emotions are plain on his face. Natasha is in more control of herself than that, but she feels drawn to him like a magnet, and there is a longing so sharp in her breast that it is hard to breathe. Her hands ache to hold him.

“How did you find me?”

“You speak French with a Russian accent, did you know that?”

Shit. She does. The soft slur of French blends poorly with the odd angles of Russian, and it is the one language she has never been able to speak perfectly.

She tries to smile and ends up grimacing.

“Nice spy work,” she says.

Bruce moves toward her. His hands are outstretched, palms up; she knows he isn't doing it knowingly, but she feels such a desire to press herself into his open hands that tears rise in her throat.

She swallows them.

“You left,” she says.

“You pushed me.”

“You _left_ ,” she says.

“I ran,” he says.

A tear slides down her face.

“Me too,” she says.

***

She doesn't ask where he's been. They sit on her bed, and she takes of her shoes and jacket. The razor is heavy in the pocket, but it's useless here.

He hasn't stopped looking at her. She feels his gaze like hands on her body.

“I saw the news from Vienna,” he says. “I saw you walk into the building, and then I saw the building fall.”

“Just another day at the office,” she says, but when the words hit the air, they are devoid of the humor and nonchalance she intended.

“Natasha,” he says.

She closes her eyes, and loses another tear. She feels Bruce's hand cover hers, his fingers holding her wrist, his thumb resting over her pulse point. She wonders if he can feel how fervently her heart is beating.

She is not a child. She was never a child. But she’s never felt so small.

Regimes fall every day. She’s had a hand in ending a few. But never before has she felt one crush down around her. 

Once in Prague, there was a great fire. It was sudden, widespread. Natasha was not responsible, but she happened to be passing through the city in the aftermath. It was too soon to rebuild; in some places, the ground still smoked. The sky was grey with ashes. She saw a woman there, her hands wrapped in bandages. The woman’s house had been near the heart of the fire; she woke in the night choking on smoke. She had two young children sleeping in their beds, and she braved the flames devouring the walls of the house to pull them out of the blaze.

Only to discover she only had the strength to carry one.

Natasha bows her head. She falls against Bruce as he folds his arms around her.

***

The prison break is on the news, but they are not watching the news. If Bruce can find her in France, Natasha thinks, then anyone can. Her German is better. The train would be faster, but neither of them is keen to face that many people. They rent a car, and drive through Belgium. Bruce says he’s never hulked out behind the wheel, but Natasha feels better driving. The countryside blurs outside the windows, and the hum of the car moving over the road and Bruce’s quiet presence calm her. 

They are driving through Ypres Salient when Bruce spies something odd on the side of the road. 

“Is that a missile?” he asks.

Natasha sees it, too, but unlike Bruce, she notices the rust caking it. 

“It was,” she says. 

Bruce cranes his head to look at the rusty shell as she leaves it in the rearview. Natasha’s eyes look forward. Bruce knows a lot about everything, but Natasha knows more history. 

“This is the Western Front,” she says. “The worst battles of the first world war were fought here. A lot of it is still in the earth; farmers dig up shells all the time.”

And bayonets, she thinks. And bones.

“It’s called the Iron Harvest,” she adds. She leaves out the part about how many of the small lakes dotting the landscape were formed when craters were left in the earth by missiles. About how some places crops will never grow because the soil is poisoned from chemical weapons. About how some of the beautiful flowers blossoming at the side of the road are growing over trench lines. 

“So it’s not live ammunition?” he says.

Natasha looks into the distance. “It could be,” she says. “There’s no way to know until it goes off.” 

***

The concierge goes on about the view of the Rhine offered to guests in the west-facing rooms. Natasha requests a room on the eastern wing, away from the pool and near the fire exit. Their window points to the portion of the parking lot where the dumpsters sit.

Natasha smiles. “Welcome to the honeymoon suite,” she says.

Bruce doesn’t say anything. He puts the luggage down at the foot of the bed; he closes the curtains. The only light is from the cheap, low voltage bulbs hidden beneath heavy, hideous lampshades. Their shadows are cast huge on the opposite wall. Natasha thinks briefly of Peter Pan, Wendy sewing his shadow to him, how Natasha wants anything but. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them, Bruce is leaning down to kiss her. 

The clock stops. Natasha can feel the oxygen in her veins. She takes Bruce’s face in her hand, and she can feel each individual cell find stillness against each other. She can hear Bruce’s eyelashes weave together as he closes his eyes.

On the opposite wall, their shadows merge. 

Natasha takes a breath. Bruce opens his eyes, looks at her. He slides his fingers through her hair, trails his fingertips down the curve of her neck, his palm sitting on her heart. She can’t breathe. Her muscles are weak. Bruce lifts her into his arms, and she wonders, for a moment, if it is because she has fainted. The world swims, the ceiling spinning in Natasha’s vision. Then Bruce’s face is over hers, and everything comes into clear focus: the color of his eyes, the shape of his mouth. She puts her hands on him, slipping into his clothing. The weight of him anchors her to the bed, and she is so glad to feel tethered to something safe and sane that she cries. He kisses the tears from her cheeks, and she pulls him inside her. 

Natasha’s fingers close around Bruce’s biceps, and she thinks of the Iron Harvest. She can feel a twist of shrapnel being pulled from her heart.

***

Natasha listens to Bruce’s elongated breaths as he sleeps beside her. Her flesh is sound again, able to tether itself to the earth. 

She thinks of the rusted shell on the side of the road. She thinks of dipping her hand into the poisoned soil and pricking her finger on the tip of a bayonet, still there after a hundred years. She wonders how long the ground will be toxic, how long until the bones and artillery will take to degrade. If it ever will.

Natasha knows a lot about history. She knows that World War II erupted from the ashes of World War I. She knows that it only ended because of the nuclear deterrent—such an antiseptic word for 130,000 dead, for black rain peeling the flesh from your bones and babies dying twisted in the womb.

She knows that only half the people dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki died in the bombings. The radiation sickness killed the rest. The ground there is still poisoned, just as in the Salient. 

Natasha wonders if the war in Vienna is over. She wonders if this is just the eye of the storm, if this tension is just waiting for a spark to ignite the flame again.

She wonders what the nuclear deterrent will be.

Natasha rests her hand on Bruce’s shoulder. Her arm moves up and down up and down as his lungs pull in oxygen, push it out. This isn’t safety. Safety has never been a factor in her life, and she doesn’t see that changing any time soon.

One day, they’ll be bones degrading under the poisoned earth. Regimes fall every day.

Natasha pulls herself against Bruce, fitting her chest to his back. She feels his heartbeat; she feels the architecture of his bones anchoring her to this time, this place. Regimes fall every day, but they are rebuilt. In Prague, the soil is mixed with ashes, but there are buildings atop it. People live there. People live in Ypres Salient, walking the battlegrounds.

When the farmers find missiles in the earth, they simply pull them up and go on planting.  



End file.
